Emergency steps fail to stem Colombia violence

By Reuters, 5/20/2003

BOGOTA -- An emergency war zone declared in eastern Colombia to crack down on Marxist rebels has failed to restore order or to stop political killings, the nation's human rights and legal officials said yesterday.

Selective assassinations continue, and violence has flared in towns adjacent to the Arauca region where military reinforcements were sent in by President Alvaro Uribe last year, Colombia's ombudsman, Eduardo Cifuentes, and its inspector general, Edgardo Maya, said at a news conference.

The presence of military reinforcements has reduced the death rate in the area, they said, but municipal officials fear for their lives and death threats have forced journalists to flee the oil-rich area on the border with Venezuela.

''Today the civilian population lives in fear, and the authorities themselves have no security,'' said Cifuentes, Colombia's top human rights official.

Shortly after he took office in August, Uribe decreed the ''rehabilitation zone'' in an area long under seige by Marxist rebels, and sent extra troops and police armed with broad emergency powers to detain suspects.

Until the reinforcements arrived, police in the Arauca town of Saravena had lived as virtual prisoners in their sandbagged barracks, under constant threat of bomb or mortar attack.

Colombia's constitutional court has recently declared most of the emergency powers illegal, although the rehabilitation zone in Arauca, and another created in the Bolivar and Sucre provinces, were due to expire anyway.

The continued presence of the military and police reinforcements has become the highest-profile test of Uribe's promises to crack down on illegal armed groups fighting in a four-decade-old war.

Cifuentes and Maya said Arauca needed more public investment as well as troops and better protection for officials working to build institutions in the province.

US special forces are stationed near Arauca, training Colombian troops to protect the Cano Limon oil pipeline from rebel bombing.

The Colombian Army, meanwhile, said it had arrested 70 suspected Marxist rebels in an urban sweep of the country's south yesterday, and the military said it confiscated explosives, guns, and 77 pounds of unprocessed cocaine.

The army's ''Operation Tempest'' took place in Caqueta Province and targeted urban guerrilla fighters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's largest guerrilla army, known by its Spanish initials, FARC.

One alleged FARC rebel who engaged soldiers in gunfire was shot dead in the provincial capital of Florencia, the army said.

Suspected rebels were also captured in the smaller city of Puerto Rico.

The military operation was among the biggest urban round-ups in recent months in Colombia. ''Tempest'' followed the capture of 14 rebel suspects over the weekend in the western provinces of Antioquia and Risaralda.

The Andean nation's conflict claims thousands of lives a year and has been made more complicated by the rapid growth of far-right paramilitary militias waging a dirty war to stamp out Colombia's more than 20,000 suspected rebel fighters.

The army said five of its soldiers were killed in combat with paramilitary forces yesterday, about 185 miles southeast of Bogota in the jungles of Meta Province.

Three paramilitary gunmen were killed in the same fighting, in a strategic, central drug-trafficking zone.

Colombia is the world's largest cocaine producer and one of the top suppliers of heroin to the US market.

This story ran on page A9 of the Boston Globe on 5/20/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.